Where once computer networks were scarce, computer networks are now quite common. Most businesses have computers that are networked together: large businesses can have hundreds or even thousands of computers connected by a network. Computer networks are also beginning to penetrate the home: as each person in a household wants their own computer, the computers need to be networked to share resources: for example, the connection to the Internet. Companies that manufacture equipment to support computer networking such as routers have responded by making the equipment easier to install and use. Frequently, a user needs to do little more than, say, plug their computers into a router, power the router up, and forget about the equipment.
But that self-same ease to network installation has made computers more vulnerable. Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and logic bombs are being written with ever-increasing frequency. And the Internet, along with the networks connected to the Internet, has made the proliferation of these dangers easier and more likely to occur.
For users, being hit with a virus or one of its kin is, at the very least, annoying. At best, a user has to spend the time necessary to identify which computers on his personal network are infected with the virus, and then disinfect the computers. At worst, being infected with a virus might require erasing the hard drive and rebuilding the software from scratch. This might require the user to lose all of the data stored on the infected computers.
For personal users, the data on their computers might be irreplaceable and priceless (for example, family photos, or personal documents). But life would go on. But for businesses, such loss of data could be devastating. Even with a proper archive policy in place, the time required to rebuild computer systems and the business network could cost thousands of dollars or more, both in lost revenue and in the costs of actually rebuilding the computers and the network. Then there is the potential loss of goodwill in having to close while the computers and the network are rebuilt.
Accordingly, a need remains for a way to identify computers that are in a potentially improper state before the computers are given access to network resources, to address these and other problems associated with the prior art.